By Paula Urtecho All it takes is a little precipitation and they magically begin to appear. Fantastical forms and colors, sometimes delicious and sometimes deadly, yes, I’m talking about mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi and if you think that all fungi are mushrooms, you’d be mistaken. Mushrooms are the exception not the rule in the wide fungal world, so when you come across one, stop to admire it. This time of year, you should run into at least a few whether on a lawn or a woodland edge. The majority of fungi go unnoticed as they may spend their entire …
Ebb & Flow
The Newsletter of The Watershed Project
What’s in your Watershed: Manzanitas
By Paula Urtecho We are squarely in winter, with cold, drizzly days that make us want to stay indoors. We tend to think of this season as a time to hunker down and go dormant, as many plants do. And yet, in the midst of winter, there is a group of native plants that defy the season and rather than becoming bare and unremarkable, they light up the cold, dark days with profusions of blooms. Manzanitas (Arctostaphylos spp.) are flowering as I write this article and they are waiting for you to get outside and witness their clusters of fragrant, urn-shaped blooms in habitats all over …
Watershed Education 2020-2021 So Far
By Dan Kirk 2021, we shall see, continues to be a mantra for the new year, and so our education team will continue to lean into being flexible, meeting the varying needs of different students and teachers in the area. Being flexible is good, but challenging at times, and so we are proud of what we have accomplished during the first half of the pilot virtual school year. Having already implemented our programming to over 200 students (with success and joy), we move forward with that success and joy as momentum. “In my opinion, what I really like about this program, is that it involves …
Walk of Dreams – In Honor of a Timeless American Hero
By Kat Sawyer Each year on the third Monday in January, The Watershed Project (TWP) and other local organizations in the Friends of the Richmond Greenway (FORG) network come together to lead a day of service and volunteerism on the Richmond greenway to honor Martin Luther King’s legacy. We knew this year’s event would have to be different given the pandemic, so our Executive Director, Juliana Gonzalez, suggested that we create a self-guided walk with interactive stations along the greenway to offer people a way to celebrate the holiday safely. We call this installation the “Walk of Dreams”, …
Collaborative Creation: Behind the Scenes of a Children’s Book
By Anne Bremer I loved watching movies growing up, and I equally enjoyed the “extras” that came with the films we rented, rarely found on the streaming platforms where most of us now get our viewing content: deleted scenes, blooper reels, and “behind the scenes” featurettes. I listened in fascination as directors, producers, screenwriters, and actors told the story of how the film grew from an idea into reality. By the time I was in high school, I was making my own movies and convinced I wanted to be a film director someday. Clearly, I took a different path in the years that followed, but …
This Year, Give the Gift of Watershed Resilience
This past week The Watershed Project had our annual holiday party, in which we all hopped on Zoom to discuss holiday food traditions, to play a blind drawing contest game, to open our secret santa gifts (which produced many cackles!), and to share an immense amount of gratitude amongst ourselves for the hard work we accomplished this year to adapt in more ways than we thought imaginable. That being said, we have also had some pretty powerful moments of pause -- time for reflection and visioning that has allowed us to grow in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t have. We want to extend the same …
What’s in Your Watershed: Black Sage
By Paula Urtecho In arriving at a subject for this month’s What’s in your Watershed article, some colleagues and I were talking about ways of healing following this awful year and someone mentioned burning sage, or “smudging”, as a means of cleansing and renewing. Sage is a plant material that is often used for smudging and it got me thinking about the Salvia species that are found in bay area watersheds. Black sage (Salvia mellifera) is one of the most widespread of the California Salvia species, ranging from the coastal ranges in the bay area to Baja California. It is a “keystone …
Turn Out the Lights and Enjoy the Darkness
By Paula White December is a dark month for us Northern Hemisphere dwellers. Here are some practices to embrace the darkness and explore its mysteries. Take a cue from nature and sleep more. In addition to true hibernators such as bears, groundhogs, and the California desert tortoise, many other animal species enter a temporary state of torpor to conserve energy during the winter months. Chickens lay fewer eggs in response to shorter days, a phenomenon I’ve observed first hand in my own flock--7 hens laid 170 eggs in May but only 29 in November. They also spend far more time “cooped up” …
